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Facing Angry Users, Sonos Promises to Fix Flaws and Restore Removed Features (msn.com) 72

A blind worker for the National Federation of the Blind said Sonos had a reputation for making products usable for people with disabilities, but that "Overnight they broke that trust," according to the Washington Post.

They're not the only angry customers about the latest update to Sonos's wireless speaker system. The newspaper notes that nonprofit worker Charles Knight is "among the Sonos die-hards who are furious at the new app that crippled their options to stream music, listen to an album all the way through or set a morning alarm clock." After Sonos updated its app last week, Knight could no longer set or change his wake-up music alarm. Timers to turn off music were also missing. "Something as basic as an alarm is part of the feature set that users have had for 15 years," said Knight, who has spent thousands of dollars on six Sonos speakers for his bedroom, home office and kitchen. "It was just really badly thought out from start to finish." Some people who are blind also complained that the app omitted voice-control features they need.

What's happening to Sonos speaker owners is a cautionary tale. As more of your possessions rely on software — including your car, phone, TV, home thermostat or tractor — the manufacturer can ruin them with one shoddy update... Sonos now says it's fixing problems and adding back missing features within days or weeks. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence acknowledged the company made some mistakes and said Sonos plans to earn back people's trust. "There are clearly people who are having an experience that is subpar," Spence said. "I would ask them to give us a chance to deliver the actions to address the concerns they've raised." Spence said that for years, customers' top complaint was the Sonos app was clunky and slow to connect to their speakers. Spence said the new app is zippier and easier for Sonos to update. (Some customers disputed that the new app is faster.)

He said some problems like Knight's missing alarms were flaws that Sonos found only once the app was about to roll out. (Sonos updated the alarm feature this week.) Sonos did remove but planned to add back some lesser-used features. Spence said the company should have told people upfront about the planned timeline to return any missing functions.

In a blog post Sonos thanked customers for "valuable feedback," saying they're "working to address them as quickly as possible" and promising to reintroduce features, fix bugs, and address performance issues. ("Adding and editing alarms" is available now, as well as VoiceOver fixes for the home screen on iOS.)

The Washington Post adds that Sonos "said it initially missed some software flaws and will restore more voice-reader functions next week."
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Facing Angry Users, Sonos Promises to Fix Flaws and Restore Removed Features

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  • Promo? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @10:44AM (#64481221)

    My guess, it's intentionally done to garner freebie press stories.

    • Re:Promo? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @12:01PM (#64481295)

      Well, the lesson from personal experience I would offer up is if you don't already own Sonos equipment stay away. The company has a long history of making customer-last decisions that will cause you pain. Everything about them is geared towards monetizing every last opportunity... which prevents them from just releasing an API that would let others focus on (easily) customizing the experience where needed.

      I have ~18 speakers in use and several more in storage because I consolidated from an apartment, office, and condo that all used Sonos into a house during COVID. With supply chain issues at the time it was the best I could do. That isn't the case today; there are many options that give greater flexibility at a lower price point.

    • by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

      just more classit corruption, and why I never buy proprietary crap from unethical corporations

      a corrupt market is a sure sign of a degenerate society

  • It's all bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @10:46AM (#64481225)

    There is no way Sonos didn't consider that removing features would piss people off. They just thought they could get away with it while serving whatever their underlying motivation for the product change was.

    • They even claimed they were being 'brave' for removing accessibility options. BRAVE.
      • Well, one of the better things about picking on the physically handicapped is a mob of them generally has trouble chasing you down the street. The blind can't even see you, mobs of the deaf generally fall apart quickly because they can't communicate except face-to-face, and while electric wheelchairs can go pretty fast and far... they're stopped by your average sidewalk curb.

        If they'd removed something for the LGBTQ crowd, that would be brave. 3-5% of the population and they can be as physically fit as th

  • Synchronizing sound doesn't seem like such a difficult thing to do to justify that kind of markup on mediocre speakers.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is actually pretty hard to do. I know a guy that finished a PhD on it about 15 years ago. Apparently you need to control delay to exceptionally high precision. A classical analog wire does that, but a network connection is a whole different story.

      • by anegg ( 1390659 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @12:04PM (#64481299)

        Sonos would like you to think that synchronizing speakers is very difficult, but a company named "Slim Devices" produced a solution that operated over standard Ethernet in 2001 called the SliMP3. All the music that people had started ripping from CDs to MP3 form (or "acquired" via Napster or whatever) could be played on ordinary stereo receiver/amplifier equipment by adding a SliMP3 to receive the digital audio data over the Ethernet and do a Digital to Audio Conversion (DAC) and put analog audio out on standard RCA jacks. The players and server software supported synchronized audio playback from the start. The server software, "SlimServer" was distributed for free and ran on Windows and Macintosh. Control was all done from either a simple infrared remote pointed at the player, or from the server software console, which had a web-based interface.

        Logitech bought up Slim Devices in the mid-2000s and expanded the DAC player line-up quite a bit, including high-end high-quality DAC players and entry level-single speaker players with local controls. When "smart phones" became a thing in the late 2000s, the phone browser became a great way to control the system. Logitech eventually called the server software "Logitech Media Server" (LMS) but continued to distribute it for free. Unfortunately, Logitech had some pains with the system, I suspect in part because of lots of half-assed wireless Ethernet implementations that made trouble for smooth playback. They subsetted their product line in 2010 or 2011. Interestingly, they built their products well and many of the devices are still working today.

        The Logitech Media Server continued to distribute the server software for free, and an open source project took up maintenance and expansion. The server software has a plug-in architecture that provides for all kinds of interesting expansions of capabilities beyond the base product. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Eventually, a market grew up in new player devices, some commercially manufactured, others based on additional free/open source projects. One of them, the PiCorePlayer, builds a player node with a touchscreen control interface using Raspberry Pi hardware rather inexpensively. A web-based skin called "Material" was developed as another project and provides very good control capabilities from mobile phone browsers.

        The server software was recently renamed to "Lyrion Music Server" and remains a free and open source project. An LMS system may not have all of the polish and commercial support of something like Sonos, but can be built for a lot less money by someone with some technical ability. It is highly capable, playing both locally stored music and music streamed from the Internet from a variety of services, including Internet radio stations, TIDAL, Deezer, Pandora, and Spotify.

        My own LMS system runs the server software on a Raspberry Pi 4B in an Argon 40 case with a 1 TB SSD for my music collection. I regularly listen to music in the main living area of my house playing simultaneously (synchronized) on a PiCorePlayer with an outboard high-end USB DAC connected to a HiFi stereo amplifier and some nice speakers, and a SqueezeAMP (another open source project for the hardware) player driving a pair of Polk ES15 speakers directly. I also have six Logitech Squeezebox Radios (single speaker, built-in amp and controls) in the system, and synchronize the music playback across all of them.

        I experimented with some other products, like the BlueSound system from LenBrook industries, but have settled on the Lyrion Music Server and assorted players as my solution to network-distributed audio playback in my home. Try it out!

        A discussion forum for the Lyrion Music server is located at https://forums.slimdevices.com/ [slimdevices.com]. The GitHub project is at https://github.com/LMS-Community/ [github.com]. A new community website for Lyrion is at https://lyrion.org/ [lyrion.org]. PiCoreP

        • by Nkwe ( 604125 )
          LMS still rocks. No mod points at the moment, but the above is important information. I have also been running the above audio and network stack since 2001 with the SliMP3 then and LMS and various modern hardware devices now. Solid audio synchronization in both mono and stereo across wired and wireless Ethernet. You can also get passable to good synchronization with generic Bluetooth speakers relayed via Raspberry Pi.
        • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          "Sonos would like you to think that synchronizing speakers is very difficult..."

          Citation please.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            It is complicated, but not really difficult. There is scientific literature that tells you how to do it.

        • by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          So, according to your story Logitech couldn't make it work?

          It would seem to me that in a typical home network it isn't an easy problem to solve?

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            It is actually publicly documented how to do it, AFAIK. My guess would be Logitech could do it but did not see the market.

            • by HBI ( 10338492 )

              They had a line of internet radios (Squeezebox) they cancelled. They worked well with LMS. When they pulled the plug on the Squeezebox was when I invested in some Sonos speakers to replace. To use the Squeezebox with stuff that wasn't LMS required application support on the box that Logitech wasn't going to do anymore. My ex-wife is/was a dolt with technology and needed something simple. Sonos fit the bill in 2012. Not so much anymore.

          • According to the story it was already working. Logitech had trouble making it meet their profit targets.

          • by anegg ( 1390659 )

            The original SliMP3 devices had a 10BASET interface, and worked quite well on a wired LAN playing back only MP3 encoded audio (in 2001 there were not many home WiFi networks, as 802.11 was still relatively new). The next player, (November 2003) was called the Squeezebox and had optional WiFi support (802.11b). As you may know, a platform-based product is dependent on the quality of the underlying platform for the operational quality of the product. At the time, many people were deploying home WiFi networ

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Oh, sorry. It is difficult to do, but it is also known how to do it. You can just read it up in the literature and implement that.

        • Unitl SONOS addresses its 64K track limit, it's a non-starter. End of discussion.

      • Apparently you need to control delay to exceptionally high precision. A classical analog wire does that, but a network connection is a whole different story.

        What you're saying is analog is superior in this respect, so why are we downgrading?

        • Yep, the first thought I had. A solution looking for (and this case creating) a problem. It's all about lock-in. Get people on your wireless this and that along with the app. Then slowly take control away if any control even existed. I'll stick with 14 gauge speaker wire thank you.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            You do not even need that much, but 2mm^2 is not excessive. The beauty of analog speaker wire is that it gives you something like 30cm for 1ns (lightspeed) and you get absolutely minimal noise and distortion from it. Network cabling or wireless is not slower in flight, but has comparative massive variable latencies on sender and receiver side.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Valid question. The answer is probably convenience or maybe just a desire of some people to be "modern".

      • I wonder how sensitive this is to the speed of sound. With two speakers, if Iâ(TM)m equally close to each, they should send the same sound at the same time. If I move so I an 3.3 meters closer to speaker A, it should play delayed by 10ms and and at lowe volume to be perfect. Except if you move 3.3 meters to the other side it should do the opposite. Except I have no idea whether either of us would even notice.

        The original HomePod measured the room and how sound was affected by curtains, furniture etc
    • Background sound in home is awesome if done right. The simple elements are synchronization, control, and flexibility. I think a pair of the base speakers at Costco is/was a reasonable value. The subwoofer and soundbar are not great value, but you get hooked by the integration. The mid and high level speakers were good at what they do. Keeping everything in a single ecosystem makes it possible to maintain great synchronization. There is no good way to go outside that ecosystem though.

      Unfortunately product o

      • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "... product obsolescence ..."

        Sonos has maintained lower "product obsolescence" than anyone can possibly expect. Literally only once in the 20+ year history of the company. This is a had faith comment, something you are apparently good at.

        "...make Sonos a company to stay away from for anything but the most basic short term needs."

        Sonos makes no products for "short term needs". It's not clear you know anything about Sonos products, despite what you say.

        • The company doesn't get to bone us with stupid software 'upgrades' and its dumb lawsuits wreaking havoc with things like Audible support on its platform (didn't work for 2+ years at least) and get to claim it's avoided obsolescence. Stuff that doesn't work right IS obsolescent.

          Their business model was contingent on people being willing to pay for massively overpriced speakers to get consistent software support without a lot of friction from stuff not working with various streaming providers. Promise broke

          • Great summary of the situation. IIRC back around 2016 Sonos started girding towards an IPO, and started looking at things like advertising to grow their profit. I get that they have recurring costs without recurring revenue, which is a challenging situation... but not a reason to buy there products any more.

      • I have four Sonos and six Apple speakers. They all play nice together using Apple’s Airplay. You can even access your music library with the app or “hey Sonos”. If anything the Apple speakers have more lock in by virtue of intercom only working between them. Same for the temp and humidity sensors. Though I suppose you could are the sensors are more of an added feature than lock in.
    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Then why doesn't Sonos have competition? It appears to be more difficult than you think.

  • Missing features (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZipK ( 1051658 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @10:52AM (#64481231)

    He said some problems like Knight's missing alarms were flaws that Sonos found only once the app was about to roll out.

    Sonos needs to retool their test harness and their release criteria.

    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      He said some problems like Knight's missing alarms were flaws that Sonos found only once the app was about to roll out.

      Sonos needs to retool their test harness and their release criteria.

      This. The way I interpret what they said is that they found something that should have been a P1 block-ship bug during late testing, but they decided that hitting an arbitrary release date was more important than not breaking the user experience. That right there tells me that they don't care about quality, and that we should expect these sorts of problems to happen again in the future. That's not a good look for a tech company.

    • No, it was a bullshit statement.

  • by ThePhilips ( 752041 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @10:52AM (#64481233) Homepage Journal

    Is this another company succumbing to infestation of "sales & marketing" people in top management?

    In the past, the moment I learned that most mobile app development was directed by sales & marketing, I understood that it'd face the same destiny as the web development. 'cause sales & marketing people can't see beyond shiny surface - and don't care about anything beyond the shiny surface. (Development is an expense account. Thus cutting dev costs = saving money = good. Whereas sales & marking is "what brings money to company!") Talking to them about missing or deficient features IME is pointless and pure waste of time.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Additionally, the sales & marketing people are probably too stupid to use anything but the most basic features and will [probably not have missed anything. As these assholes are typically also very full of themselves, they probably could not fathom that other uses could do more with the old system. "That is a feature only absolute experts can use" or crap like that.

      • Indeed. Additionally, the sales & marketing people are probably too stupid to use anything but the most basic features and will [probably not have missed anything. As these assholes are typically also very full of themselves, they probably could not fathom that other uses could do more with the old system. "That is a feature only absolute experts can use" or crap like that.

        Quoting your post because that's almost exactly what I was about to point out.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Indeed. Kind of obvious by now to any smart person that sales & marketing and the typical MBA cannot understand reality.

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Is this another company succumbing to infestation of "sales & marketing" people in top management?

      Succumbing? No, they started out that way. Deliberately producing a product that was incompatible with anything except their own products. Vendor lock in was their business model.

  • Who knew? Well, certainly not them. Will they learn? Probably not.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Damn. The second one should have been "cranky".

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Do crappy things, get crappy users? That makes no sense at all.

      In what way does Sonos have "crappy users"? What they have are assholes who complain about them based on things they know nothing about. And how does breaking their app create "crappy users"? Sonos hasn't replaced their app in forever, and the app is only one of a number of ways to use a Sonos system, one BTW that almost never use.

      My experience with most Sonos users is that they are tribal defenders of the company's products, not unlike Apple

  • by ZipK ( 1051658 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @10:59AM (#64481239)
    Forced upgrades of apps are fundamentally different than user-chosen upgrades of software. User-chosen upgrades of software often allow users to linger on older versions until a new version is stable and of sufficient parity to be a workable substitute. Forced upgrades of apps leaves users to suffer the whims of product management (or worse, marketing), and whatever they deem to be the MVP. Worse, it leaves users to suffer whatever inadvertent inadequacies are present in the test harness and release plan.
  • Rollback (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Monoman ( 8745 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @11:07AM (#64481251) Homepage

    If they really cared they would let people roll back to the previous version until they get the new version right.

    • by indytx ( 825419 )

      If they really cared they would let people roll back to the previous version until they get the new version right.

      This, and this should be required for so many software updates. In a less imperfect legislative environment, we might see right to repair extended to right to install software of your choice, etc. I really don't know why so many companies don't allow users to download and install older versions except for greed. What I really hate is owning a piece of software that you paid for, and when something happens requiring you to reinstall, you can't find a version you own and discover that you would have to repurc

  • Sonos has been pulling this crap for a decade or longer now. They don't give a shit. https://en.community.sonos.com... [sonos.com]
  • by ve3oat ( 884827 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @11:39AM (#64481275) Homepage
    The moral of this story is that you shouldn't pay for "software" that is actually just a service. If you want a permanent set of features, you should get software that you actually own and that does not rely on an Internet connection to the true owner. In other words, don't rent your services.
    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      You don't pay for the Sonos app. It appears that everyone commenting here knows nothing about Sonos, standard /. stuff

  • by methano ( 519830 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @11:45AM (#64481283)
    I own a beach house with my sibling. My sibling and her spouse decided we needed a Sonos system. I can't figure what it's good for mostly because they run the TV all the time. I also have a Tesla Model 3 LR. Last week the navigation and the cameras went out. It still runs fine otherwise. THREE f...ing weeks before they can get around to trying to fix it. Yes, everything is flaky software. The problem is that they figured out how to make hardware that last forever and people quit buying. So they put flaky software in front of it. I've got a Whirlpool washer and dryer from 1989. A repairman recently told us to never ,ever think of replacing them with something modern. Scientific equipment is the worse. We've got hardware at work that still requires Win2000 and nothing else. It's still running, though IT won't let it on the network. There's millions of dollars of fine scientific equipment at work that get's thrown to the curb because of software. We've got stuff that requires a dongle in the parallel port. WTF! Arrrrgh!

    Just my 2 cents on this topic!
  • I just want to play music. The Sonos app is overcomplicated, slow to start, periodically forgets that my speakers exist, and requires an internet connection to work. I could go on...

    What it doesn't do, is make me ever want to buy another Sonos product.

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      All the way at the bottom before there's a single comment about the product in question at all. Yes, the new app sucks. But of course it requires and internet question, it accesses streaming music services!

      "What it doesn't do, is make me ever want to buy another Sonos product."

      The app isn't the product. Your interest, or disinterest, in Sonos products should be well established before this momentary blip in the quality of their app. It will be improved, but your attitude will not be.

      • The app is a critical part of the product. I own 2 arcs, 2subs,2 eras, and a beam. Iâ(TM)ll never buy Sonos again after this. I canâ(TM)t even get trueplay to work in my movie room. The old app was superior.

  • by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Saturday May 18, 2024 @12:42PM (#64481363)

    Does the concept of "roll back to the last known-good version and/or configuration" have no meaning in Sonos-land?

    • Indeed. Even if their systems cannot support direct rollback/have backup firmware on board, and require monotonically increasing versions they could reissue the previous version with a new number with the ChangeLog being "We are 'lead' by nimrods"

  • I only use Sonos for listening to mp4 files stored on my PC. It worked (more or less) fine, until Sonos automatically updated and lost all those connections. Trying to set them up again gave all kind of access errors. Googling the error message didn't help. After a day of fiddling with Windows settings I could make it work again, but I doubt many Sonos customers will succeed to do so.

    It's unbelievable that Sonos forces this update on their customers without providing instruction how to make it work again.

  • After the first day, the new update doesn’t show up under the app update list in iOS unless you specifically search for the Sonos app. I think they knew the screwed up big time pretty quickly, now they are in CYA mode and are hoping the sunk cost of systems is enough to get the angry customers to wait out the updates. Seriously folks, never turn on automatic updates. 95% of the time it won’t matter, but when it doesoh boy you will be grateful.
  • Every time you buy a product which requires someone else's computer (a.k.a. the cloud) to function, you are effectively paying a a service, rather than a self-contained product you own. If there is no monthly fee, you are pre-paying for the service up front, which is actually worse than monthly service fee, because there is no incentive for the service provider to keep the service working well, or even working at all - they can just choose to discontinue it at any time, or change it completely. At least wit
  • ROFL. I like "days or weeks". Within 10,000 days is still consider with days, right? Back it up with some tangible guarantees - all will be fixed in X weeks or we buy your speakers back at full price you paid, they we got something worth the air it was breathed into. I wonder if they accept the same ambiguous "days or weeks" for payment terms on their products.
  • Near as I can tell, Sonos is far from a stranger to consumer-last behavior, especially in regards to strategic deprecation and placed obsolescence?
  • ... written all over it even back in the day when they appeared hip and were advertised by Tim Ferriss.

    IoT is a potentially dangerous fad and I steer clear of it even in enticing products where it makes some sort of low-key sense like perhaps with robot vacuums.

    It's very very stupid idea to use IoT or cloud stuff for anything valuable and mission critical. For me that includes my music and audio collection.

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